Something had happened, but she wasn’t exactly sure what it was. In an effort to get some purchase on it, she was going over the progression of events that had just occurred.
At the end of the service she’d lingered in the chapel talking to Audrey while Richard disappeared off into the reception. After a while she and Audrey had left the chapel with Audrey’s two kids following behind, squeezing through the crowded vestibule to the room beyond, where the refreshments had been laid out. While Audrey poured herself a cup of coffee, Sara had been staring absently through an archway that led into another, longer room. A knot of people under the arch broke up and she’d glimpsed Richard at the far end, talking to a woman in a black jacket with a silk scarf. Richard, who was facing away from Sara, was rubbing at the bald spot at the back of his head, which was something he did when he was agitated. The woman was smiling at him in a way that seemed appeasing, or anyway actively sympathetic. She’d looked faintly familiar; her striking features and long brown hair evocative of some far-off occasion, though Sara couldn’t place her.
Audrey had come up, with her coffee. Just then the woman had put her hand on Richard’s arm and said something that made him rub his bald spot furiously.
‘Do you know who that is with Richard?’ Sara had asked.
Audrey turned. At once, a look of acute distress had appeared on her face.
‘It’s Francesca,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realise she was here. I’m leaving.’
She looked around for her kids.
‘Wait – who is she?’ Sara had said.
Audrey seemed not to understand.
‘Huh?’
‘I mean, who is she?’ Sara repeated.
‘You must know who she is!’
‘I don’t.’
‘She’s the woman your husband introduced to Victor. It’s who he left me for. The second time. Though I think she dumped him pretty quick. I assumed you knew, Sara.’
Two bright patches of red had appeared at Audrey’s cheeks.
‘No,’ Sara said. ‘I had no idea.’
‘I can’t believe she came. Anyway, I’m leaving.’
Abruptly she’d gathered her kids and led them off.
Sara had turned back towards Richard, but he was standing with Victor’s brother now and the woman had disappeared.
An elderly man had come up to her as she was trying to remember where she’d seen her before.
‘Wasn’t that a moving tribute?’ the man said. ‘I thought that was the most moving tribute …’
She’d had no idea who he was, but tried to look politely attentive as he spoke to her, though in fact it was impossible to pay any attention at all. The things she had just heard and seen seemed to require urgent processing, as certain dreams do on waking. Nodding and smiling, she’d found herself probing blindly into fifteen years of memory for the woman’s image.
Then Richard had come up, looking agitated.
‘We should get going,’ he’d interrupted unceremoniously.
Not wanting to offend the old guy, she hadn’t immediately responded, and Richard had stood there looking increasingly impatient while the other man rambled on. After a couple of minutes, Richard had interrupted again, this time too forcefully to ignore, and they’d made their way out.
She hadn’t liked being hustled out like that, and did what she did when she was annoyed, which was to retreat into herself. It wasn’t exactly characteristic of Richard, to order her around, though she’d noticed recently that he was more focused on her than he used to be. More attentive, she had to acknowledge, as well as more demanding, which was nice, she supposed, though occasionally she couldn’t help feeling oppressed by it. He’d started accompanying her on her afternoon stroll in the woods if he was home, something she’d always taken for granted as a solitary interlude in the day, and she’d found herself resenting the intrusion.
By the time they’d reached the car, he seemed to have gotten over whatever was bothering him.
‘You okay?’ he’d asked.
‘I’m fine.’
‘You’re very quiet.’
‘Just thinking.’
She’d been about to ask him about the woman he’d been talking to, but had stopped herself, not wanting him to ascribe her taciturnity to some fit of possessiveness.
They’d driven in silence for half an hour, when she felt his hand on her knee and, ever obliging, she’d laid her own hand over his. She could ask him now, she thought. But still she held back; silenced by a foreboding that he might lie to her. In a sense he’d lied already by volunteering nothing about this woman, either today or back whenever it was that he’d introduced her to Victor. But an omission wasn’t quite the same as a direct lie and she realised she very badly didn’t want him to lie to her directly.
What am I afraid of? she wondered, lifting her hand from his. She thought of that other time he’d lied to her, pretending he’d caught the early-morning train when she’d seen his car next to Bonnie Fletcher’s in the municipal parking lot. She’d never confronted him, waiting instead for him to explain himself. Even when it became clear that he wasn’t going to, she’d refused to allow herself to speculate or interrogate him. Accustomed to her own privacy, she was wary of probing other people’s. It wasn’t that she couldn’t imagine the questions another woman might have asked. God knows she’d had plenty of general guidance on that front, from Carla. She’d even picked up what had seemed a more specific hint one afternoon near the end of that summer when she’d overheard one of the Rainbow girls in Carla’s barn saying something that included the phrase ‘Sara’s husband’, only to be shushed by the other girl as Sara immediately made her presence known. Bonnie had just driven off somewhere. She’d wondered even then about this reluctance of hers to probe. Am I afraid of what I might learn if I push too hard? Is that why I don’t question him? But no sooner had the thought articulated itself than a vehement, almost bodily repudiation of it along with all its demeaning implications had risen in her, and she’d angrily closed the subject.
She stared out through the passenger window. Had she been deluding herself? Was it possible, after all, that there’d been something going on between Richard and Bonnie? Merely coupling their names seemed to entail an act of violence against her own sense of reality. Richard, pushing fifty, sensible, responsible, wryly amused by people who differed in any serious way from himself – and Bonnie, barely thirty, with her patchouli scent, her silver feather earrings, her iPod in its moccasin case at her hips, her look of being permanently a little high on something …? No, it wasn’t plausible. Too much that seemed solid and incontrovertible would have to turn out to be pure illusion for that to be conceivable.
Anyway, she wondered, puzzled by the turn of her own thoughts, why was she even thinking about that now? What did Bonnie have to do with this other woman, Francesca, or whatever her name was? She seemed to have caught herself in a curious labyrinth of things past and present, remembered and forgotten. Again, more concertedly now, she tried to recall where she’d seen the woman before, struggling to light up the dimmest of distant occasions for some clue; rummaging through Richard’s professional acquaintances, his more distant relatives, the handful of people he kept in touch with from his home town …
‘Who was that woman you were talking to?’ she asked him at last, exasperated by her memory’s refusal to cooperate. ‘The one in the leather jacket?’
Richard frowned, as if trying to think who she meant.
‘Oh, her. She was one of Vic’s girlfriends from way back. Before he married Audrey. I only met her once or twice but I guess I was the only person she knew there. I couldn’t remember her name though …’
He’s lying to me. Sara felt the knowledge enter her: sharp and hard.
‘She looked familiar,’ she said, still unready to challenge him more directly.
‘No, not possible. This would have been before you and I met.’
She sat very still, staring forward.
And then, as if the reverberations of the lie had removed an obstruction from some delicate mechanism full of gears and springs and flywheels, she felt the memory of Richard’s abrupt, unexplained wish to get out of New York all those years ago shift inside her, and with a quick sense of things uncoupling and regrouping, she realised where she had seen the woman.
It was at Ryden College. She’d gone there to meet Richard, who was practising with his folk group. Hearing music she’d wandered down a corridor from the lobby and seen them through a glass panel, six or seven of them strumming and plucking and singing, among them the woman with that unmistakable head of hair, sitting over a dulcimer with a look of dreamy absorption in her instrument.
‘Well? Do you know it?’ Richard’s voice cut in. He had been talking to her.
‘I’m sorry – what?’
‘Baucis and Philemon. Do you know the story?’
‘No.’
‘This old couple who love each other so much the gods turn them into two trees intertwined around each other when they die.’ He smiled at her lovingly in the mirror. ‘I was thinking of it for some reason.’
She looked away, unsure whether the fear gripping her was of the future or the past.
‘Are you okay, Sara?’
‘She was at Ryden College, wasn’t she?’ she said, turning back to look at him. ‘In your folk group.’
Richard’s face tensed.
‘What? Who are you talking about?’
‘I saw her there. Audrey said you introduced her to Victor. He had an affair with her, just after their second child was born. Her name’s Francesca. You must have kept in touch with her over the years.’
Richard frowned exaggeratedly, opening his mouth as if to ask again who she was talking about. But he closed it instead, swallowing.
‘All right’, he said. ‘All right. I was just trying to make a complicated story simple.’
‘You told me a lie.’
‘Christ almighty! All right. I’m sorry. But it’s totally innocent. Good God, Sara! I’d be happy to tell you the whole story in all its extremely boring detail if you really want to hear it.’ He gave a sidelong glance.
She turned away.
‘Do you want to hear it?’
‘I want to know why you told me a lie.’
‘All right, I’ll tell you. It’s very boring, so be warned.’
Richard paused, and then sighed, rather theatrically. ‘I mean, okay, it’s embarrassing too, mildly, as well as complicated. Because it does have to do with me having been vaguely attracted to her at one time, ages ago, so there’s that. But it’s innocent; I give you my word. Do you want me to tell you, Sara?’
She said nothing. The thought of that other lie had brought back the whole episode of the swan, and the creature was in her mind again, brightening there, drawing her inward like a source of some mysterious strength.
‘Okay, I’m going to tell you the whole thing. I don’t want you having any suspicions about me …’
Through the window the forested grey slopes flanking the throughway were tinged with gold light at the top. She thought of the day she and Carla had driven with the swan to the river. They’d arrived late in the afternoon. A handyman had unchained the gate and they’d continued down to the boathouse, where a wooden dock jutted into the water. A few hundred yards out into the mile-wide expanse of the river was a long, thin island with a fringe of cattails where other swans nested. She and Carla had carried the swan out of the car in its basket and set it down at the end of the jetty, stepping back to let it free itself when it was ready. For several minutes it had sat in the basket, not moving. Sara had wondered if it wasn’t after all going to seize the opportunity to free itself. She’d half-hoped it wouldn’t.
‘He’s taking the measure of things,’ Carla had declared. ‘They do that.’
Beside her in the car Richard had launched into some convoluted story to which she was barely listening. Something about not wanting to tell her he’d known Francesca from Ryden College precisely in case she did get the wrong idea, a fear he seemed to be attributing to the fact that, yes (he kept saying yes, as if strategically conceding some point in a legal argument), he had been attracted to her, and yes, he might even have been tempted to have a fling with her if he hadn’t already been head over heels in love with Sara, and that, yes, on the basis of this attraction he had irrationally feared that Sara wouldn’t believe he’d run into Francesca years later entirely by chance while he was walking down Third Avenue with Victor. None of it seemed real to her. She let herself slip back into that summer afternoon.
‘You see?’ Carla had said, when the swan stood up at last in the basket. And in spite of herself, Sara had felt a sharp joy travel through her. With a brief shudder of its wings as if awakened suddenly to the memory of freedom, it had stepped out of the shallow basket, and hobbled to the edge of the jetty. Holding its wings forward it had let itself fall into the water with a soft splash and glided off towards the island.
Richard was talking more calmly now; the story he was telling having apparently settled into a congenial form in his mind. ‘So yes, I was attracted to her. I’ll admit it. But there was never any possibility of my getting involved, even though she’d made it clear she wanted … you know, that she wanted that. But it wasn’t easy and it certainly wasn’t comfortable seeing her every day in the classrooms and corridors. And yes, that’s frankly why I quit. I never told you about her because telling you would have made it seem as if there was something for you to be concerned about, but there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. I only wish for Audrey and the kids’ sake I hadn’t been with Victor when I ran into her on Third Avenue. I introduced her to him, just to be polite, and I think she said something about working as a singer, maybe even mentioned a club where she was performing. I wasn’t paying any attention myself, though I guess Victor was. But that’s Victor, right? Of course, he never told me anything about it. Anyway …’
It was the image of the creature moving away from her that had lodged itself in her mind. Moving away as effortlessly as if it had let go of something and was free-falling into its own future.
Richard was still talking, though his words might have been in a foreign language, for all the effect they were having on her. Something seemed to be crystallising inside her; something clear and bright though not yet ready to put in words, its form as yet indistinguishable from that of the swan gliding away from the shore; cutting a wake of light as it moved further and further out across the river, undaunted by whatever lay ahead.
Approaching the island it had merged into the glare of sunlight, becoming invisible. A few seconds later the sun had sunk behind treetops on the far shore and the glare had gone, but by then the creature had vanished into the reeds.